Can We Have Hardware T&L Support For Ah?

[AKIron]

Skuzzy, if all the cpu had to do was poly manipulation and rendering I'd agree with your last statement. However, it has to divide it's time with other functions such as object positional calculations, etc....

Nvidia produced hardware T&L years before CPUs were up to 1.8GHz and I don't recall that it reduced performance. I also doubt they did it for no purpose other than marketing.



Just realized that Skuzzy was refering to cpus over 1.8ghz. Hadn't considered that.

[Skuzzy]

Actually Iron, NVidia's first true hardware T&L cards were the GF4's.  Previous cards did not have an onboard T&L unit, but were actually software driven on the card.

And yes,..if the CPU is very slow, the use of T&L could make a difference.

Displacement mapping in DX9 actually provides a good reason to use T&L in some instances.  Unfortunately, ATI's 9700Pro is the only DX9 card which has support for it and the NVidia NV30 (FX) does not.
So it will be some time before any developers look at that technology.

Not to say DX9 support will be a ways out.  I suspect DX9 support to come faster than DX8 support did, due to the new shader technology and the use of full floating point color.

[715]

Why wish for more polygons?  The game can use them only in the plane renderings.  Those (at least the latest ones) are pretty good already and more polygons in a plane are wasted when it's flying by you at such a rate you can't see it.  AH could use way, way more polygons in the terrain, but the games engine is hard coded to accept polygons no finer than 1/2 mile on a side.  It's impossible to make terrains with any higher resolution than what already exists.

I didn't know that Nvidia had pulled the wool over everyone's eyes so successfully and got us to pay $300 every year or so for technology that is actually useless and would slow our games down if we turned it on.  I guess they're clever little devils.